


Migratory Birds

by nekare



Category: Supernatural, X-Men (Movies)
Genre: Apocalypse fic, Community: apocalyptothon, Crossover, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-04-20
Updated: 2011-04-20
Packaged: 2017-10-17 22:19:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,425
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/181861
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nekare/pseuds/nekare
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When the end comes, one brother is on one side, and the other on the opposite.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Migratory Birds

**Author's Note:**

> Sort of AU-ish for SPN, post X-3 for X-Men. Apocalyptic crossover!

Sam’s powers manifest when he’s ten, when he tears half the house down.

 

\----

 

Their lives are weird enough that something as small as Sam being able to destroy everything he touches hardly makes a blip in their radar for the longest time. The word _Mutant_ starts popping up in the newspapers, though, and Sam once gets beaten for shredding a notebook by mistake. Dean teaches him some moves, and the next day, Sam gets expelled for giving the offender a bloody nose and a black eye. He chants _It’s not fair, it’s not fair, it’s not fair,_ in his tiny, broken voice for a day straight, and Dean goes white-knuckled with indignation. He pats Sam on the head, tells him everything will be all right and that the town sucked, anyway, and then he goes and breaks into the principal’s house and writes ‘Asshole’ on his bedroom wall in neon green paint.

Sam’s a smart kid. He learns to make people see him the way he wants them to.

He spends most of his teenage years trying to be as normal as possible, all polo shirts and big smile and perfect grades, fitting in everywhere he goes. Dean, who wears ratty Metallica shirts and bangs the entire cheerleading squad under the bleachers and organizes burping contests in the cafeteria doesn’t get it, finds the idea of being just like everyone else absurd. Then he catches Sam using his powers in secret, hands against a rusty pot that crumples onto itself, and sees the look on Sam’s face, both exhilarated and appalled at his own taste for destruction. He stops leaving the half-sarcastic, half-truthful notes on his pillow or school books saying _Be yourself, Sammy, you’re a beautiful butterfly as you are!_ surrounded by pink hearts. The little bitch didn’t appreciate his tender brotherly gestures, anyway.

Sam’s powers are an incredible help on hunts. Or whenever they can’t find the can opener. Dean encourages him to use them, goes as far as inventing excuses in which he may need them, because he figures they’re a part of Sam, just like a kidney or something like that, and he might _need_ them for living, whether Sam likes it or not. With a little training, Sam’s powers actually _evolve_ , become strong enough that he doesn’t even have to be in contact with whatever he wants to destroy. Dean actually swaggers the day after the breakthrough, smugly takes all the credit and Sam calls him a fucking idiot, laughing.

For the most part, he just wishes Sam didn’t have to be so alone.

 

\---

 

Dean manifests when he’s nineteen, almost on the verge of turning out to be human after all, and the look on his father’s eyes, the pained one, has him silent and withdrawn for a couple of days. He says he likes it, though, having another way of being able to keep his family safe.

Sam likes it too, secretly, mostly because it means that he’s not alone anymore.

 

\----

 

The only time their father ever mentions Sam’s mutation is when Sam announces he’s going to Stanford. _And to think I still raised you, even knowing what you are,_ he says, and everything goes silent and Sam opens his eyes very wide and Dean wants to yell, wants to hit something, preferably his father, because of all the things he could have said to make Sam leave them forever, that was the worst.

Sam leaves, and their father regrets those words for the rest of his life, because Dean knows he never meant them, that he was just too scared of having his boy walk out on him, alone and unprotected.

He tells Sam, later, how Dad would start apologizing every time he drank too much, or every time something got too close and he ended up bleeding everywhere, but he’s not sure Sam ever believes him.

 

\----

 

Jess is a sweet girl, but she’s also a smart one, and she thinks long and hard before deciding whether she wants to stay with Sam after she finds out about him being a mutant by accident.

She stays, and then she dies, and it makes it even more painful, knowing that she was the one girl with whom Sam knew he could be completely himself with. Everything after her death is a blur – Stanford, classes, her blood on his forehead as she died above him on the ceiling, covered in fire. There is only the road and the Impala beneath him and Dean treading carefully around him and their father, ever-present even when missing.

Their first hunt together after Jess’s funeral, he rips the Wendigo open from the inside out, doesn’t even blink, and Dean watches him, face sprayed with blood, with something akin to fear.

Sam shrugs it off, and doesn’t much care.

 

\----

 

After Stanford, Sam starts using his powers almost openly.

“What the hell, dude,” Dean says after Sam rips the lock off their jammed motel room door instead of kicking it open. “I thought you were all about secrecy and subtlety and all of those other annoying esses,” he says, surprised. Then again, everything about this new Sam, taciturn and angry, surprises him these days.

Sam shrugs. “I’m done hiding who I am. It’s not like I’m ashamed of myself.”

“Well that’s all very good, but it won’t stop people from being, you know, _people_. In case you haven’t noticed, being a mutant isn’t exactly hot for the season.”

“I tried normal once, Dean. It didn’t work out so well.”

Dean knows that look, the one he gets whenever he thinks of Jess, so he doesn’t push it.

 

\----

 

The government starts talking of Sentinels in 2006. That’s when things start going wrong between them.

 

\----

 

They watch the manifestations and speeches and riots on TV in between jobs. Dean always keeps his finger on the channel button, as if wanting to reassure himself that he can stop himself from watching, from knowing, but he never does press it.

It’s an anti-mutant rally this time, mourning for a teenager that was killed by a young mutant, a kid no older than ten. The crying people being interviewed don’t mention the fact that the kid had almost been stoned to death, and that he’d lashed out in self-defense. They always seem to forget details like that, people on TV. They’re burning human-sized dolls with blue sprayed skin. There’s signs saying _death to the muties_ hanging from their necks.

Humans. They do like getting their point across.

They’re sitting cross-legged on Sam’s bed, shoes off but socks on, sharing a pizza. There’s a grease-stain on the cheap coverlet from where a piece of pepperoni fell on it.

“God, this is horrible,” Sam says, grimacing, and Dean takes a swig from his beer instead of stating the obvious.

Sam stares at him with a look of pure disgust. “Doesn’t it bother you at all, Dean? This is your _race_ they’re attacking,” he says, lips curled, and it sometimes scares Dean a bit, Sam’s intensity.

“Fuck that race shit, we’re all human beings, Sam,” Dean says, angry himself. “I’m not about to lower myself to their level, that’s all.”

Sam snorts. The image cuts to the kid, Brian Emery, age ten, wearing orange overalls and sitting in the corner of a prison cell, shaking and trying not to look at the camera. He’ll be tried like an adult. It makes Dean feel sick to his stomach.

“Someone should put a stop to this,” Sam says, flustered and breathing hard with indignation. “Someone should make this right.”

“Who? That psycho Magneto and his jolly band of brainwashed followers? They only make things worse.”

“Yes. Maybe. Magneto – he could make this right.”

The way he says it, completely convinced, makes Dean shiver. Sam does nothing by halves. “Please tell me you don’t buy his crap, Sam. Please.”

Sam shakes his head. “We’re not human, Dean. And watching this, I don’t think I want to be.”

 

\----

 

A Black Dog in Idaho and Sam feels raw, weary. The creature is too powerful and too filled with magic for his powers to be any good, and they only seem to make it angrier. It comes at him, roaring, drizzling saliva from in between yellow fangs. He aims for its liver, feels it shred and tear as his hand mimics claws, but then the thing is on him and he releases his hold with a grunt of surprise. Sharp teeth sink on his arm and he cries out, feels warm blood seeping out under his sleeve.

Dean shoots the thing on the head, and it whines, far too much like a dog, before turning on him. Sam pants, throws his head down on the ground for a moment and _breathes_ , tries to clear his head. He’s running on adrenaline and fear and not much else. The victim of the week, a middle-aged salesman, is cowering by the corner, scratching at the plaster. Sam rises and goes to him, knowing that Dean can handle the skinwalker for a moment – unless he’s injured, nothing can’t get past his force field, and it’s a relief, at least, especially knowing how much Dean likes putting himself at risk.

The man cringes away when Sam offers him his hand. “Don’t touch me, you freak!” he shrieks, high-pitched, and Sam starts shaking with fury, every muscle tense and teeth grinding.

“I’m trying to help you, you bigoted moron.” He ends up having to knock him unconscious when the guy keeps on crawling away from him, yelling at Sam to get away. He throws him outside the house with rather more force than necessary, but doesn’t feel especially apologetic.

The creature burns, but Sam feels nothing of the usual post-hunt high.

When they go out the man is still unconscious, lying still on the grass, limbs akimbo, in the exact place Sam left him. “So he preferred the blood-thirsty beast to the mutant that was trying to save his ass? Man, that’s messed up,” Dean says, digging his boot into the guy’s kidneys. His lip is curled, but he doesn’t mean much by it, just that this particular guy is an asshole and it’s a shame and that’s it.

Sam, Sam doesn’t see it that way. He’s tired of being feared more than the things he kills to keep assholes like this one safe.

He vows to make it stop.

 

\----

 

They fight just outside of Minneapolis, after ten hours of driving. They’ve taken the art of bickering to a whole new level in the years since Sam got back from Stanford, but this is new. There’s a real bite to the accusations, to the insults, and they’re both aiming to hurt the other one as much as they can.

It starts about the usual subjects; their messed up life growing up, their father’s never ending stubbornness, his readiness to risk his sons for his vengeance. Then it escalates until it’s about _Your fucking blind belief in this stupid megalomaniac wearing a cape and a funny helmet,_ and _Your ridiculous pacifist views. At least I’m not afraid of making a stand, Dean, and I’m taking my species’ side._

They shout hard enough to drown out Robert Plant’s voice coming from the speakers.

Sam says stop, and Dean hits the breaks so hard Sam has to put a hand against the dashboard to brace himself. Sam gets out of the car, slams the door, and Dean wants to hit him, wants to stop him, wants Sam back instead of the man obsessed with an insane cause that resembles his father so very much.

By the time he gets out of the car himself, Sam is getting his stuff out of the trunk, muttering to himself. “What the fuck,” Dean says, sounding more scared than angry, and they’re at it all over again. Sam shoves Dean, Dean shoves back, Sam punches him on the jaw and Dean gives him a black eye.

In the end, Sam walks away, the pavement cracking under his feet, and it feels too much like those first months together, right before the entire mess with Meg and her psychotic demon father started.

This time, Sam doesn’t call to say he’s sorry. He doesn’t call at all, actually.

 

\----

 

Sam finds the Brotherhood two months after he gets out of the Impala.

It’s tricky business, since he can’t really just ask around for Magneto. Instead, he recovers whatever skill he got as a hacker on his teens, rusty after years of no use, and impersonates seven government agents in various agencies to locate their camp. Then he has to go through their defenses, and through their guards, and through their traps. When he finally stands in front of Magneto, he’s limping, and dizzy with so much blood loss. Magneto smiles at him, at his bloody hands, and claims to know all about him.

“That was quite a lot of incentive you showed, my boy,” he says, before grabbing Sam’s chin and forcing him to look backwards, at the trail of destruction he left in his wake. It makes Sam shiver a bit, watching the destroyed machinery, the torn down electric wiring that make sparks fly everywhere and the bleeding people. He wants to forget and knows that he won’t. “I do like that on a person.”

Sam swallows hard, steels himself and says the words he’s been planning to say for months. “I want to join you. I believe – I believe it is the only way for mutants to live in this world.”

Magneto keeps smiling. “You can stay. We could use someone like you around here.”

 

\----

 

Dean doesn’t find the X-Men. They don’t find him, either – they find what he’s after, rather.

It’s a ghost, a simple salt and burn, a girl that after a hundred years is still looking for the wedding ring she lost just before she died. The job’s tougher now that Sam isn’t on board, but it’s nothing Dean can’t handle. The stairs of the abandoned house creak, almost too ominously, too very cliché, and the spiderwebs get tangled on his hair.

He doesn’t really count on the ghost almost killing the girl that owns the ring now, along with her small child and husband, or on the pair of glorified super-heroes that show up and mess up everything.

He’s never been shy about using his powers in gigs, not when it’s just another way of coming home (motel sweet motel) alive afterwards, but for once the force field he puts around the family don’t get as much attention as the ghost disappearing into a cloud of dust after he shoots it does.

“What _was_ that?” the girl asks. She looks about twelve and is wearing black and pink leather. Dean wonders about the state of youth these days. The guy behind her, the one that has Russian mafia spelled all over him, is just gaping, eyes and mouth wide open. He would look like an idiot, only his entire skin is made of steel, which gives him somewhat of a free pass in Dean’s eyes.

“Haven’t you ever seen a ghost, kid?” he asks, all nonchalance because he hardly ever gets to brag, and the girl frowns.

“I’m not a kid, thank you very much.” She turns around to see if the people huddled by the wall are all right, helps them stand up. They look fairly shell shocked, but they seem to be decent folk – they don’t pull away from them, at least. Once she seems to be confident they’re okay, she looks at him again. “That was pretty awesome, though,” she says, and Dean grins.

Later, once they’ve burnt the girl’s bones, along with her ring, the guy asks approximately a bazillion questions. They were looking for a rogue mutant, and they discovered ghosts are real instead, so Dean can’t really blame them for being a bit intrigued. They tell him about Xavier’s school in return, about their mission and what they’re trying to accomplish. It sounds like quite a tall order for guys wearing leather and playing Superman, but something tells Dean they can be trusted, and that they’re honest.

It’s been a long while since he’s met honest people.

“Nothing is going to solve itself, you know,” the girl, Kitty, says. “We have to do what we can if we want peace.” Their idealism reminds him somewhat of Sam, of his hopes of making the world a better place for mutants, but there’s a certain realism to what they’re trying to achieve, and at least they’re doing it the right way. They’re also lacking the feverish, furious look in the eyes of everyone he’s seen from the Brotherhood on TV, the same one Sam would get from time to time. The one that would scare him.

“Why don’t you come and see for yourself?” Steel-boy says. He introduced himself as Piotr, but that’s not nearly as amusing. “You don’t have to sign up for anything, just see if the place suits you. Any help is appreciated, anyway.”

“I don’t know. I think this whole fight among the races, or whatever, is pure bullshit, and that both sides are acting their worst. And at the same time, being fucking Geneva is getting really awkward.”

Steel-boy shrugs. “Like I said, we’re not making you do anything. But we could use someone like you around the mansion.”

 

\----

 

Being with the Brotherhood is like being at constant war. There’s a certain paranoia that comes with the job, and something as simple as breaking camp or shaving in the morning can turn into a brawl, or an accusation of spying for the other side. Who exactly is the other side, Sam isn’t sure about – Magneto seems to think everyone who isn’t with him is against him, and the ideology carries into his make-shift troops.

Pretty much everyone takes an instant dislike to him. Some of the people there have been trying to get Magneto’s attention for years, and Sam did it in his very first day. He’s supposedly with allies, but he learns not to go anywhere without a knife, and it keeps his powers sharp.

Magneto wants to know all about the occult. Demons, Necromancy - he keeps asking about it, over and over, with the same look he gets whenever he counts his assets on this war he’s waging against the human race. “Just imagine the possibilities,” he says, and Sam won’t admit it, but his blood runs cold.

Dean once told him his belief in Magneto bordered on fanatical. Sam doesn’t like admitting it to himself, but he knows Dean was somewhat right. Even so, the fact stands that he doesn’t tell Magneto how to summon demons. He doesn’t really like thinking why.

One of the first missions he goes on involves tearing down a bank’s vault, while Magneto holds the guards hostage with their own guns. As he fills a canvas bag with more money than he has ever seen in his life, jaw tense under his black mask, he says, “I thought we were doing this to help mutant-kind.”

Magneto smirks. “We are, my boy. But one cannot save the world without enough funds. Remember that,” he says, and the childish part of Sam that wants to believe in fairy tales dies that day.

He believes in the cause, believes in getting freedom for his species, but being with the Brotherhood makes him jumpy, makes him paranoid, makes him suspicious of everyone and everything. He feels like a pawn, playing by arbitrary rules Magneto changes at will.

He always felt like too much of a mutant while growing up, never like the normal kids, and now, in the midst of his kind, surrounded by outcasts and social pariahs, his fancy Ivy League education and memory of a family that always accepted him makes him feels like too much of a human.

 

\----

 

Xavier’s Institute for Gifted Youngsters has quite a staff shortage, so Dean gets roped into a teaching position almost immediately. He teaches Folklore and Engeneering, and the fancy words for his every day knowledge amuse him. Still, the kids love messing around with cars, and they seem to take his Folklore class as an excuse to tell spooky stories.

It’s amazing how a bunch of kids that can fly or read minds or have spikes covering their bodies can laugh at the idea of an angry spirit. Dean takes them on a hunt, one of those amateur haunting jobs he’d usually never bother taking, and that shuts them up. From then on, he’s practically idolized around the mansion.

Ororo, the apparently self-appointed headmistress, gives him a twenty minute lecture on the wrongs of risking the children. Dean mentions the Danger Room and calls her a hypocrite. She nearly fires him.

Kitty turns out to not be twelve after all. Dean still doesn’t make a pass at her, thanks to a lifetime of avoiding minors. She might not be jailbait, but she sure looks it, and Dean has been run out of towns enough times to have learnt his lesson.

He once touches Rogue on the shoulder by accident, and wakes up twelve hours later in the infirmary. She apologizes, far too many times, actually, and watching her wring her gloved hands together and biting her lip makes him want to hug the kid, tell her it’ll be all right. Most of the other kids avoid her, see her as a traitor for having once taken the cure, but Dean can’t blame her. He can only imagine how lonely she must feel.

He sometimes comes with on missions. It’s enough like a hunt that he sort of likes them – the rush, the adrenaline, the satisfaction of helping people. He’s not used to the enemy being other human beings, though, homo sapiens and mutant alike, instead of dead things, and it throws him off balance, makes him hesitate.

Dean likes the place, though. Likes the kids with their idiosyncrasies and curious faces, likes drinking cheap beer with Logan and telling stories of the many girls they’ve known and having burping contests, likes teaching. Likes having a purpose, having people to protect again.

 

\----

 

Dean refuses to wear those fucking stupid uniforms.

 

\----

 

Sam asks whether a uniform would be a good idea, to bring them all together.

 

\----

 

Sam takes to this asshole of a guy, Pyro, bleached hair and wide grin and a rebel to the core. He wears leather and listens to dead rock. He’s a couple of years younger than Sam, but already higher in the food chain and with a certain look in his eyes that’s far too old for his face. “Fuck ‘em, whatever they think, man, it shouldn’t matter to you,” he says all the time, and he says it with complete conviction.

Sam likes him because he reminds him of Dean.

 

\----

 

Dean takes to this geek, Bobby, wide eyes and perpetual frown and the quintessential good guy. He wears sweaters and reads far more than what’s good for him. There’s something broken about him, something that he avoids talking about so deliberately that it ends up being ever present. Dean likes fixing things. Bobby looks far younger than his actual age, and far more innocent than he actually is, even when dressed in leather and readying for battle. It looks sort of wrong, that a kid his age might be asked to risk his life for the cause. Bobby says that it’s worth it.

Dean likes him because he reminds him of Sam.

 

\----

 

“Magneto is building something,” Pyro says while they eat side by side outside Sam’s tent. It looks like rain, and the food sucks, so Sam has been mostly sucking on his spoon and looking at the sky for the last fifteen minutes.

“How do you know?”

Pyro rolls his eyes. “I know you’ve only been here for a couple of months, but shit, man, you could at least try paying attention to the stuff going on around you.”

Sam kicks him lightly on the shin. “Enlighten me, then, you asshole.”

“Forge has been trailing after him for a week already. There have been funny noises and explosions coming out of Magneto’s tent for the same amount of time. And the last group of scouts that went out came back with a bunch of those musty old books with all that magic crap you told him about. You join the dots, genius.”

Sam’s only met Forge a couple of times, but they’re enough to know just how good he is at developing machinery. Add that to Magneto’s ever rising interest in the occult, and Sam is worried.

“We should probably check that out.”

“No shit.” Pyro might be a firm believer, but that doesn’t stop him from wanting to rebel – from _everything_ , it seems – every once in a while.

So they drag themselves through the mud and use military signs and behave like children all over again, enjoying every minute of it. Then they take a look at what Magneto is doing, and suddenly it’s not so funny anymore.

 

\----

 

“There’s something you need to know.”

All four participants in the supposed ‘staff meeting’ turn to look at Bobby, looking pale in the doorway. Rogue is right behind him, arms crossed and a frown on her face.

“Magneto’s planning something. Something big,’ Bobby says, looking grave.

“No offense, Bobby,” Ororo says, talking the way she would do to a child, not an equal teammate. Dean’s always found it too patronizing. “But how on earth would you know?”

“John just called me, sounded relatively freaked out for--”

Ororo interrupts. “Wait – you’re still in contact with _Pyro_?”

Bobby glares at her, and Rogue beside him does too. “His name is _John_. And no, I wasn’t. Not until now.”

“Sorry to say it, kid,” Logan says, his feet on top of Ororo’s desk, “But it has trap written all over it.” Hank doesn't say anything, but he’s always ready to give anyone the benefit of doubt.

“Look, I know John, all right? And I know how much he believes in Magneto. And how much he resents the X-Men. Trust me, he sounded like he’d rather kill himself than make the call. If it wasn’t something really, really bad, he certainly wouldn’t have made it.” Bobby makes it sound pompous, he tends to do it every time, but pompous suits Bobby, and it doesn’t make it any less true.

Ororo actually pats Bobby on the shoulder. “Bobby, I know how much you want your best friend back, but--”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake stop treating him like a child already,” Rogue says, white with fury, and gains Dean’s respect.

Half an hour later, Ororo decides to wait and see how things go. An hour later, Rogue and Bobby steal the jet. Dean goes along, if only because someone has to keep them from getting in trouble.

And also because _dude_ , stealing a jet. He certainly isn’t missing that.

They’re too late.

By the time they reach the camp Bobby’s friend told him about, most of the Brotherhood is trying to escape, leaving everything behind as the machine smack in the middle of the camp glows brighter. Magneto is standing by it, smiling softly at it, arms outstretched, and from the look of it, it’s finally happened, he’s gone completely insane, and not even his subordinates can deny it anymore.

“Jesus,” Dean says to himself, lightly. There are runes on the machine; powerful, destructive signs, stuff Magneto doesn’t have any right to be messing with. No one can reach him, not without falling dead on the spot. Dean doesn’t even try and then forgets all about it when he sees Sam’s dirt-stricken, terrified face among the running crowd.

“Sam!” he shouts, and starts running toward him, forgetting he’s supposed to stick close to Bobby and Rogue.

“Get out of here, Dean, it’s going to explode!” Sam yells above the crowd, and Dean can barely hear him, doesn’t really register it because it’s such a relief, finally seeing him after all these months.

Then the earth starts moving, and Magneto smiles beatifically at the sky, enraptured. Dean reaches Sam, throws him to the ground and forms the strongest, largest force field he’s ever created in his life.

The world goes white.

 

\----

 

Sam isn’t sure what Magneto does. He doesn’t know the how, and he can’t even start imagining the why. He just knows that the earth shakes and everything goes white and that the world as he knows it comes to an end.

 

\----

 

Dean wakes up to Sam shaking him. “Oh, thank fuck. Oh God. You’re okay. Good.” Sam seems to be on the verge of hyperventilating, eyes very wide and breathing fast. Above him, the sky looks odd – too clear a blue, almost as if the color had been washed off.

“What happened?” Dean asks, and then he sits up and sees for himself. Whatever it was that Magneto built, it exploded in a tidal wave that destroyed everything on its way. There are corpses all around them, calcinated skeletons that are still smoking, jaws unhinged. They go as far as Dean can see.

“Jesus Christ,” Dean says, and then presses a hand to his mouth to keep himself from throwing up. Sam looks just as shaken, and his hands keep on twitching, as if he doesn’t know what to do with them.

There’s a soft groan nearby, and they both turn around, half alarmed and half thankful of having something to do other than stare at the dead. When they reach the noise, they find Rogue, half buried in rubble, but alive. She’s frowning, on the verge of waking up, and Dean has to pull Sam back when he tries to reach for her. “Don’t touch her skin. Trust me, just—don’t.” Sam nods, and then takes off his jacket and puts it under her head before lifting her up. Dean’s force fields are more unstable at the edges, and she’s bleeding in a couple of places, but she’ll be all right.

Dean needs to believe that, because he was the one that didn’t stop her from coming.

When Rogue wakes up and takes a look around, she can’t stop shaking. “Oh God, oh God, oh God,” she mutters to herself, but then Sam says they have to keep looking for survivors and she’s an X-Men again, composed and ready to help.

Bobby is only a few feet away. Rogue is the one that checks his pulse, eyes wet, and then she sighs with relief and wipes at her eyes with the back of her hand, leaving wet patches on her dirty gloves. Once they pull him out, they realize Bobby had been trying to cover a boy with his body. The boy looks even worse than Bobby. _Pyro,_ Sam says at the same time Rogue says _John,_ and then they both look at each other weirdly until Bobby makes a sound and they forget all about it.

Bobby they find easy to wake up. The other boy – John – they don’t. Once Bobby is over the initial shock, he explains, sounding somewhat ashamed of himself, that he had knocked John out before everything went off. _He was running after Magneto, he was going to get himself killed, I--_

“You don’t have to explain, Bobby,” Rogue says, lips pursed. “You saved him. You have a knack for it.”

There are two other survivors, a big guy that flees as soon as he digs himself out of the debris, and a sickly-looking boy no older than fourteen who has to be physically removed from the remains of his older sister. He hadn’t been inside Dean’s force field, so Dean guesses it was the sister that kept him safe. He can relate. The boy’s looking a bit green at the edges, though, and he’s bleeding from both ears.

They have to move, and fast. There’s no room for explanations, or fear, or grief.

“We have to get out of here,” Dean says, trying hard to look at the other ones so he won’t have to look at the piles of dead bodies.

“Agreed. Very much so,” says Rogue.

It takes them a while to leave what was once the Brotherhood’s camp; none of them are thinking straight, and they have to carry John, who was still feeling the effects of Bobby’s blow.

“It’s okay,” Dean says, trying to convince himself as much as the others. “We’re bound to find some help sooner or later.”

Three weeks later, they still haven’t seen another living thing.

 

\----

 

The first few weeks are bad. They’re all scared, and tired, and no matter how far they walk they find no one at all.

Nathan, the youngest in the group, is still in shock, and apart from his name, he says nothing else. He cries softly at night, knees pressed to his chest and face against his knees. Sam wants to comfort him, to tell him everything will be all right, but he knows it won’t, so he lets Dean do the talking and the earnest back patting. He’s always been better with kids than Sam.

It’s not the same case, anyway. Nathan lost everything he had in the explosion – Sam still has Dean.

Pyro is a wild card. He never saw the explosion, only the aftermath, and he keeps wanting to go back, back to Magneto and his insanity. Sam wonders if he’d be the same if he hadn’t seen Magneto cracking the skies open with a smile on his face. Probably.

Dean, who doesn’t really know him, keeps on shrugging and saying they’re probably better off without him, but Sam and the others, they need to cling to a piece of the world _before_ , and Pyro represents that, that dangerous, volatile part of each of them they’re not exactly comfortable with, and yet can’t do without.

The eighth time Pyro tries to leave the group, he and Bobby end up fighting.

“I saved your life _again_ , you fucking ingrate,” Bobby says, and Pyro shakes with fury, kicks Bobby hard enough to send him reeling into the remains of a tree.

“ _Again_? Whenever the fuck did you ever save me in the first place, Drake? Because let me tell you something, dragging someone out of a warzone and dumping him in the fucking _street_ does _not_ constitute as saving someone!” he yells at Bobby’s face, and then they’re fighting again, Bobby hitting as hard as Pyro.

They start fighting with powers, which makes for one hell of a showy business, and they end up rolling on the floor, wrestling and kicking and biting, like children, and when Dean pulls them apart he treats them like children as well.

Pyro is finally convinced that the explosion is not a scam the first time they pass through a small town and all they find is bodies and destroyed homes. He’s sick on some shrubbery, and then he steels himself and doesn’t mention the brotherhood again.

Sam gets it, unlike the others, how he can take Magneto’s betrayal to heart, because he does too.

After a while, the click of Pyro’s lighter becomes as familiar as breathing.

 

\----

 

They have to take cover at nights.

As soon as it grows dark, clouds start gathering in the sky, thick and black, somewhat too ominous. Then the wind starts, and dust and ash and debris fly everywhere, and it looks like those fabled sandstorms of the desert, only now the sand is dark, and it might have been a human being once. Lightening flashes through the clouds for most of the night, illuminating the world far too bright for only seconds at a time. When it finally rains, just before dawn, the rain is acid, and burns through whatever plants remain.

Dean wonders if the earth will ever heal from whatever Magneto did to it.

The storms begin four days after the explosion, and then they have to run into the first shelter they can find, an abandoned barn with unhinged doors. The wind howls outside, almost drowning out any other sound.

“Your side fucking lost it, man,” Dean says, out of breath.

“I’ve kinda already noticed, Dean,” Sam says, and then he smiles, and Dean has to grin in return, because it’d been months since he’d last seen Sam, and he’d become a sort of a phantom limb, always and never there. Sam is safe, and Dean can breathe again. It’s a bit of a relief.

At first, they keep hoping they’ll find someone eventually. Then, as the days go by and they find nothing but more and more deserted towns, they start doubting they ever will. As they move away from ground zero, the destruction lessens, goes from leveled buildings to scorched houses, from calcinated skeletons to burnt bodies to dead people that just seemed to fall dead to the ground, no markings on them. It still doesn’t seem to have spared anyone, though.

Five weeks after the explosion, they hear barking, and they all run towards it, bright-eyed with excitement. It’s a stray dog, its fur at least five different colors and a tail that curls around itself. It’s too thin, ribs pertruding, just like the rest of them, and it wags its tail and jumps around, tongue out. John’s the one that reaches it first, practically hugs it, scratches its ears, all the while talking to it. When he realizes everyone else is staring at him, his eyes narrow.

“What? I like dogs, all right? Fuck off.”

“You’re such an asshole,” Bobby says with a smile, and then they’re all patting the dog, feeding it whatever scraps of food they have.

That night, after the others have gone to sleep and Sam and Dean are drinking stale beer, the dog lying down by their feet, Sam says, rubbing at his chin, “I wonder why it didn’t get the animals as well.”

“Beats me,” Dean says, but Sam has that focused face of his, eyebrows together and mouth set, and Dean knows Sam hates having a mystery in front of him that he can’t crack.

“It doesn’t really matter, Sam. Shit went down, the world died – however can knowing how it happened help?”

“It could. We could reverse it.”

Dean shakes his head. “And what, have six billion zombies walking around? You know it doesn’t work like that. You just can’t give life back to that amount of people.”

Sam closes his eyes, rubs the bridge of his nose. “I know. I wish I didn’t.”

Dean takes a long swig of his beer. This entire situation is easier to face when drunk.

Nathan loves the dog. He calls it Fred, for some strange reason, and keeps on offering it treats and trying to get it to play fetch. Nathan has been sick for most of his life, going from hospital to hospital, or at least the ones that would treat a mutant. His parents are long dead, and it was his sister the one who always took care of him. Magneto convinced Nathan’s sister that his cure was in the hands of mutants, not humans. She trusted him, and died for it, but not before saving her brother’s life. The boy is a bit lost, and ill, and starved for affection. He goes to sleep with the dog curled around his ankles.

The dog follows them around for a couple of weeks, barking ahead of them at everything that interests it, wagging its tail. Then, it leaves one morning, goes after a particularly intriguing trail and doesn’t come back. “It’s the way of strays, kid, it’s not like it’s personal,” Dean says, and notices that both Bobby and Rogue stare at John, intently, like he’s just voiced their own fears, and he wonders whatever happened to mess them up this bad but is too nervous to ask.

Nathan nods, eyes lowered, shoulders hunched. Dean worries about the kid, too frail-looking for this new world, but doesn’t quite know what to do about it. He looks at Sam, and he just shrugs, scratches his head. They walk in silence for the rest of the day.

It’s just another loss in a long string of losses, but Nathan doesn’t really recover from it.

 

\----

 

“You think it happened everywhere?” Nathan asks as they set up camp for the night, sitting on a rock and looking at the sky. Bobby builds ice shelters whenever they find themseves too far away from towns or even caves to get under a proper roof. He’s been getting more and more creative as of lately, and tonight they’re sleeping inside something that resembles a swiss chalet. Last night, it’d been a pagoda. Pyro mocks him for it, but Bobby shrugs and freezes Pyro’s shoes to the ground and goes on making ice, chuckling.

“What, the whole ‘the world is deaaaaad’ shtick?” Pyro says, shaking his fingers as he elongates the word, and Sam snickers but feels bad about it when he sees Nathan’s grave face.

“Don’t be an asshole, John,” Rogue says, almost absentmindedly, like she’s so used to saying it. When they were in the Brotherhood together, Pyro had told Sam how he used to be in the Charles Xavier’s school, and how it’d sucked, and that was it. Now, he realizes how Pyro says so much in the things he doesn’t say, how the more he cares the more he wants to make it all just go away. And Sam used to think _he_ was messed up.

Dean sits on the rock next to Nathan. “Probably,” he says, ignoring Pyro’s comment. “I mean, if it’d just happen in the States, other countries would be sending planes with food, or help, or something like that, wouldn’t they?”

They all look up, as if on cue, stare into the pale sky and look for something they know isn’t there.

“So we’re alone?” Nathan asks, sounding like a small child, still looking up, and Rogue puts a hand on his shoulder.

“You’re not alone. You have us.”

 

\----

 

Thanks to Bobby they never go thirsty, and thanks to John they never go cold. They sit around a fire at nights, eat whatever they could salvage from abandoned 7-Elevens they find on the way - the food’s a bit stale, yeah, but it seems to be mostly all right. Bobby, Rogue and John always sit rather too close, shoulders and knees pressed flushed against each other’s, with Bobby in the middle, holding them together.

They tell stories. Sometimes it’s movies, books, random anecdotes that happened to a friend of a friend, sometimes their own lives. Dean tells everyone how Sam used to have nightmares with clowns; Sam shoves him and then tells about the time Dean had hooked up with a guy dressed up as a girl and could never tell the difference.

No one laughs, but they smile, and it’s a start.

It feels a bit ancient, magic, telling stories by the fire. Like thousands of years of human history never happened, and they’re still sitting in caves, shaping tales with just words and flickering light. In a way, it’s fitting, because if they’re really all that’s left, mutant-kind is pretty much screwed, seeing that even if she wanted to, Rogue can’t have children. And if they _are_ all that’s left, human-kind is already over and done with.

It makes a shiver go down Dean’s spine, the thought that all ends with them. It feels like too much of a responsability.

 

\----

 

They all find it hard to sleep at night. Sam tosses and turns in his stolen sleeping bag, and hears the others do the same. Nathan cries for his sister. Bobby mourns for his family. Rogue for the only home she ever knew, and Pyro for the leader that betrayed him so badly. Dean – Dean mourns for the world. Sam is oddly content; life becomes one giant road trip, with no expectations and no reproachments and no criticisms. He feels somewhat liberated.

He wonders what’s wrong with him.

The kids all tend to sleep close to each other, Bobby and Rogue so much that it must be dangerous, close enough for Bobby to be accidentally killed if he rolls over. Pyro starts the night almost out of sight, and wakes up with his face almost brushing Bobby’s back. Nathan sticks to a distance of five feet from anyone since the first night. They squat in houses almost as much as they sleep outdoors, and then Sam and Dean take the living rooms, by the windows, easier to protect, and the kids fight for the rooms, sometimes share them and it’s not like Sam’s their father to order them around.

The kids. Sam should really stop calling them that – they’ve been fighting for their lives for almost as long as he has for his own, but he can’t stop thinking of them in that way. He thinks of himself at nineteen, twenty, and he remembers feeling ever so grown up.

Nathan usually ends up as the odd one out. It makes Sam a bit guilty, but there’s not much he can do – he closes up on his own, stays silent for long stretches of time and just stares at the world passing by with eyes open too wide and hands clasped together.

They take clothes from wherever they can. If it’s a house, a girl’s wardrobe, Rogue puts her arms around herself, saying, “This is Laura’s. She was a gymnast, there was a picture in her room,” like she wants to keep it in her memory forever, like she wants to have someone at least to remember this dead girl. Sam prefers raiding malls, likes his stuff to be his and not a memento of someone long gone, and maybe that says the world about him. Bobby and Pyro don’t care at all. They sometimes even share, and they end up with either small shirts or too big pants. Nathan clings to the clothes he was wearing the day of the explosion with a fervor that is just unhealthy.

They sometimes take cars, usually the ones parked neatly at homes or at parking lots, because they can only stand to drag the dead owners out so many times. Dean drives fast, and Pyro drives faster. They all laugh and sing stupid songs and roll the windows down, let the wind play with their hair. It never lasts long. The gas ends up running out and then they’re back in the middle of nowhere, stuck to walking.

After the end, there’s a multitude of firsts. The first time they hear birds singing, the first time they manage to get a generator to work and make popcorn while watching Finding Nemo, the only DVD they could find in the house. The first time Pyro says _us_ and not _you_ , the first time any of them milks a cow and the first time Sam can use his powers so openly it almost seems wrong, having this kind of freedom.

Life goes on, after everything else dies, and Sam finds it almost comforting.

 

\----

 

“So, what was your codename?” Sam asks, somewhat hesitant, sitting beside Dean on the ground. The kids are arguing about something or other not far ahead.

“You really think I would get one of those lame-ass names? Come on. Never in a million years would I call myself, eh, Mr. Protection or, dunno, the Magic Bubble or some other crap like that.”

“Oh,” says Sam, looking a bit uncomfortable. “Okay. What they called you, then?”

“The X-Men called me Dean and the kids Professor Winchester. Makes me sound worldly, doesn’t it?” he says, with a grin, and Sam grins back. “Okay, fess up. What was _your_ codename?” He just _knows_ Sam had one. He’s the type.

Sam mumbles something, face red. Dean makes him repeat it. “ _Destroyer_? For _real_? That is so unbelievably lame, Sammy.”

“Oh, shut up, you—” Sam starts, and then adds, after a pause, “you Magic Bubble.”

They laugh together, for a long while, for the first time in weeks.

 

\----

 

They see the first ghosts about a month after the explosion. It’s just a clutter of people, so real looking that they all run towards them, beaming, and then they go through them and the spell is broken.

Pyro had heard Sam’s stories, but never really believed them, and he keeps going “Shit, man, what the fuck, that was – fuck. That was so weird.”

After that, they see ghosts everywhere – some of them just seem lost, scared, and some of them are more violent than Sam or Dean had ever seen. Finding their bodies is near impossible, not with so many corpses around, so they mostly leave it alone, ignore them or run from them and surround themselves with salt they take from grocery stores by nights.

It’s painful, seeing this mirage of people walking down the streets, hearing names yelled. It’s a reminder of all that they’ve lost.

They stumble across small hunts all over the place, solve them on the go and stay clear of the big, dangerous ones. There’s not really any reason anymore to save the world from kelpies and fairies and djinns. They were there long before humans were, and they’ll be there long after every single one of them is gone.

Some demons take to possessing half-rotten bodies. When they exorcize them, the demons laugh, congratulate them on this fine hell on Earth they’ve built.

No one contradicts them.

 

\----

 

John farts, and everybody laughs.

“Oh God, you are all _disgusting_ ,” Rogue says, looking like she’s about to throw something at John. She stabs at her canned beans with her spoon a couple of times, violently, and then she says, “I miss girls,” in a completely different voice, soft and low. “I miss having decent conversations. I miss Jubilee. Fuck, I miss _Kitty_ , and I never thought I’d say that.”

Everyone goes quiet for a while, because truly, none of them can really get how lonely it must be being the odd one out. She’s always alone, Rogue, be it because of her powers or her decision to take the cure or because of fate alone. It makes Dean feel a little guilty, even if he knows he’s not responsible. Feeling guitlty about everything and anything that goes wrong around him has always been the way he lives, he just can’t help it.

John is the one to break the silence, characteristically. “Wait, I thought Kitty’d been with Colossus for like, ages?”

“Well, yeah, but Bobby keeps being all weird around her,” she says, all matter of fact, and Bobby has enough presence of mind to blush. “And then she—wait. How the hell would _you_ know who she’s dating? You haven’t been around home in years.”

“I have my ways,” John says, his spoon inside his mouth, cocky smile and raised eyebrows. “Also, Xavier’s isn’t _home_ , thank you very much. Home is where the heart is, darling, didn’t you know?”

“Ah, then I’m guessing home right now is six feet under with Magneto?”

“Okay, that was low,” John says before launching at her, tackling her to the ground, reckless, not really bothering to take care of not to touch her, like he always does, and she shrieks with laughter instead of alarm, and then Bobby is joining the scuffle and it’s like a bunch of kittens, fighting and playing and being young and stupid.

“Remember being that age?” Dean asks Sam, who has been quiet most of the night.

Sam smiles a bit, plays around with his own beans. “Yeah. You were such a pain in the ass.”

Dean laughs. “Likewise, dude, likewise.”

 

\----

 

Another deserted town, another road blocked by cars with their dead owners still inside, rotting with no one to remember them, and just as the silence gets heady, claustrophobic, there’s the pitter-patter sound of feet behind them.

“We’re being followed,” Dean says, almost out of habit, and then they all realize what it means. They all stop, looking around them, and the sound of steps pauses as well. When they move, it starts again, and it goes that way for half an hour until Sam gets tired of it, whirls around and yells, “Hello? Anybody there?” in the general direction of the office building behind them. There’s no response, not for a long while, and then there are sounds to their right, and the tell-tale click of Pyro’s lighter before he sends a fire ball towards the noise.

They all turn to look at him, each of them looking like they’re refraining to hit him. “What?” he asks, hands up and fake innocence.

“You are such a moron, Allerdyce,” Bobby says, and Pyro smirks a bit.

“Well, there goes our chance of being approachable if it actually is someone else,” Dean says. He’s right, of course, and Sam could hit Pyro himself.

The steps start again, now fading and no longer cautious, just worried about fleeing. Dean starts running towards the noise, the rest of them following him.

The trail ends in an apartment on a third floor, dirty and trashed, covered in moist earth from upturned plant pots. There’s a woman in the farthest room, all sunken eyes and pupils dilated, her hair unkept and with leaves twisted on it. She’s holding the dead body of what Sam guesses was once her son, rocking it slowly, singing lullabies.

Rogue makes a small gasp behind him, just as he puts a hand to his mouth. The windows are all closed, and it smells like decaying flesh.

The woman starts back when Dean reaches for her. “Ma’am, we can help you. Let go of him, so we can bury him,” he says, speaking softly, just like you would do to a wounded animal, and she shakes her head, eyes very wide.

“Leave us alone,” she says, voice low and rough. Dean moves towards her, and she pulls a knife from somewhere, slashes the air and almost gets Dean, who puts a force field up by sheer instinct. She starts shrieking, curling herself around the body in her lap. “Get out of here! _Get out!_ ”

They back off, and as soon as they’re out of sight she starts singing lullabies again, as the day ends and darkness shrouds her.

They leave her there, and for the most part, they try hard not to think of her.

 

\----

 

They walk towards Westchester almost by inertia.

The world dies on July, and they’re outside Xavier’s school by early November, the air crisp and cool and cleaner than Dean ever imagined it to be.

Dean doesn’t really know what he expected by heading out here, but there’s a small part of him that always thought that maybe, just maybe, the explosion left the mansion alone, and that he’d find recently cut grass and his annoying students looking out through intact windows and a warm place to come home to.

They stand in front of the mansion’s ruins for a long while, watching the burnt wood and blackened plaster, the way there are vines growing along the walls, breaking windows and creeping inside.

If it makes Dean feel this fucking depressed, he can only imagine what Bobby and Rogue are feeling.

John is hanging a bit back, hands in his pockets, fidgeting. “It was your home too,” Bobby says, and John curls his lip.

“No it fucking wasn’t,” he says.

Bobby shrugs. “Suit yourself, man. You try convincing yourself.”

The garage Dean left the Imapala in doesn’t have a roof anymore. The explosion, storms and time combined left the car useless, rusted orange. It feels wrong, wanting to cry over her just as much as for the children Dean taught in here, but he does anyway. Fixing her is no longer a possibility, not without the right equipment. He pats the hood, gets behind the wheel and runs a hand through the ruined upholstery. He doesn’t say _I’ll miss you,_ like he wants to, because it makes it too final.

They’re about to leave when Rogue yells, “Wait!” and starts running towards the mansion. They all follow, and when they reach her she’s trying to access the underground levels.

“Attagirl,” says Dean, smiling broadly at her, and curses himself a bit for not having though of it earlier. Once they go down, Sam gapes.

“What kind of school was this?” he asks, somewhat awed.

“Home of the X-Freaks, man, what did you expect?” says John before anyone else can say anything, and Rogue scowls.

They find a neat stack of papers in a room furnished with boxes and matresses and folded blankets. It smells lived in. Dean listens as Rogue reads, his heart beating too fast. Some of the kids had been in Danger Room practice when the explosion hit. Piotr turned into metal at the nick of time. Logan survived. He always survives, it’s just what he does. Dean recognizes Kitty’s precise, bold handwritting, the clipped prose from her Folklore essays saying how they’d stayed in this same room for a while, just riding it out, and then they’d decided to move, find a better place to stay. The last sentence reads _I hope this will be found someday, and that whoever finds it will know they’re not alone._

“They’re alive,” Rogue says after she’s done reading, soft and broken. “They’re alive,” she repeats, and then she cries like she hasn’t since the world went to hell. Bobby puts his face on her shoulder, John resting against her other side, and Nathan takes her hand. Sam doesn’t know any of the people she mentioned, so he smiles.

Dean doesn’t cry. Really, he doesn’t. That’s just some dust in his eyes.

They stay for almost a week, and then Nathan asks if they can just stay there, at least for a while.

Sam shakes his head. “Winter is coming. We won’t survive it if we stay – the snow will bury us, and we wouldn’t be able to dig ourselves out until spring. No, we have to go south.”

“Like birds,” Nathan says, sounding all of five instead of fourteen, and Dean grins.

“Exactly like birds.”

 

\----

 

The first snow of the year is pure white. It’s all bright, big snowflakes, the perfect shape to catch with one’s tongue, and Sam had never thought they could exist outside of the movies.

They have a massive snow fight, with forts and artillery and Bobby cheating, creating his own snowballs, and Pyro cheating too just out of principle, melting the other team’s warfare. Soon, everybody’s playing dirty, using powers, and Sam hasn’t had so much fun in years.

They have a white Christmas, singing carols through chattering teeth and seeping somewhat stale instant hot chocolate. They decorate a tree with ice ornaments, and Pyro lights it up later, for kicks, and it looks beautiful for a moment, pure dancing fire, until they force Pyro to put it out and they have to find a new tree.

It’s been six months since the explosion and sometimes, Sam thinks it’s the best thing that ever happened to him.

 

\----

 

Nathan dies on February.

His illness acts up again, and no matter how much they all fuss over him, none of them are healers. Bobby can vaguely remember Professor McCoy talking about medicinal plants, calling them by their long, unpronounceable scientific names, but he doesn’t remember enough to recognize them in the wild.

Winter hasn’t been good on them – they’re all too thin and haggard and hungry, and everyone but Bobby keeps on shivering all day long. It only takes a week of illness, and then Nathan’s gone and Dean feels like he’s failed him.

“You didn’t, you know,” Sam says while they’re digging Nathan’s grave. “Fail him, that is. You did everything you could.” Dean’s always wondered if Sam’s mutation isn’t actually telepathy.

“Yeah, well, fat load of good it was to him.”

There’s no salt and burn because they’re pretty sure Nathan isn’t coming back. They bury him by the road, and plant a tree on top of it instead of a gravestone, so he’ll have company. They all say a few words, even John, who likes to act like he hates everything and everyone. Millions have died, but this one, this one feels personal.

It’s hard to tear themselves away, so they camp around the grave that night, and if it’s morbid no one comments on it. They leave the next morning, eyes wet and weary minds.

“We’ve been thinking,” Rogue says some weeks later, the boys fidgeting behind her. “That it’s time we go our own way.”

In the end, it’s the quiet, introverted boy that was holding them all together. It’s oddly fitting. Once he’s gone there’s no real reason to find security in numbers. They’ve all been hardened by life, and they’re all survivors.

They say their goodbyes, and go on opposite ways in a crossroad. Say it like that, it sounds like a song, like cheap poetry, and all it’s missing is the sunset and the sad music but it still makes Dean feel somewhat empty inside.

“I guess it’s just you and me again, Sammy,” he says after a while, once he can no longer see the three dark shapes walking away if he turns around.

Sam snorts. “It’s not like it ever wasn’t,” he says, and Dean grins and punches him in the shoulder and it’s okay, he’s okay.

The sky is getting bluer every day over their heads.

 

\----

 

Almost a year after the explosion, and only the two of them once again, they run across Jo. She’s running a small colony of survivors near Arkansas. She’s aiming a shotgun at them the first time they see her, frown in place and lips thin and her body tense, ready for everything. She doesn’t put the gun down when they come out of hiding. Sam feels oddly proud of her, like he’s now seeing her all grown up.

They’re standing in the underground parking lot of a suburban mall, all gray walls and concrete and almost no light at all now that the electricity’s gone. It makes Jo look paler than she is, in contrast with the dark bags under her eyes. It’s almost incongruous, the pretty little blonde leading the burly men behind her, but if anyone is fit to fill the role, it must be Jo.

“If it’s really you you’ll have to convince me,” she says, and Sam can see Dean practically beam at her beside him.

“Then listen up, sweetheart, because I’m not admiting to actually liking REO Speedwagon twice.”

Sam doesn’t really get it, but Jo raises her eyebrow, moves her head just so and then smiles slowly, putting her gun down. “Can’t blame a girl from being too careful these days.”

The farm the colony is using as home base is large and lighted, homey, all fluttering curtains and children playing on the lawn outside. When he looks closer, Sam realizes there’s a thick salt line covered by ductape on every single windowsill and doorway.

Jo explains she was hunting something in the sewers when the explosion hit. She’d found survivors pretty soon, mere days after the big bang, and from then on they’d been moving like a group, adding new people as they went. They’d only found the farm some three months ago, and then decided to stay after realizing they had to become self-suficient with so many people around, instead of surviving off of convenience store scraps, like Sam and Dean and their own little group had done for so long.

There’s actual cornbread for dinner, and Sam could just about die of how good it is. Dean actually kisses the cook, a middle aged woman that used to own a gourmet bakery in New York.

That night, as Jo is giving them a tour around the house, Sam sees a girl around twelve putting her hands around her mouth, blowing at them, and then there’s bubbles coming out of her mouth, large and rainbow-slicked and all of the children are laughing, urging her to make more.

“She’s a mutant,” Sam says before he can stop himself, sounding half-awed, and Jo steps in front of him, looking violent.

“And you got a problem with that? Because the door is that way.” Jo’s never really trusted him, not since he almost killed her while being posessed, anyway, but he’s never heard that tone of hers, steely and determined and almost vicious.

He shakes his head. “I don’t. But after all that’s happened I just didn’t expect humans and mutants to be on speaking terms with each other.” Dean walks over to the children, encases a bubble inside one of his force fields and dares the kids to break it. Jo stares, for a moment, and then she bites her lip.

“We stand apart, we all die,” she says, looking her age for the first time since Sam saw her in that parking lot. “Our only chance is sticking together.” The kids are laughing, the younger ones tugging at Dean’s pants and asking him to do it again.

“I didn’t know,” Jo says, and Sam shrugs. They stare at Dean playing with the kids, and Sam talks about how nice the house is just to keep himself from asking what happened to Ellen, and what they did with the bodies of the farm’s original owners.

There are four more mutants in the commune. It’s twenty-one people all together, ranging from ages five to fourty-three. They live, play and work together, for the most part in harmony, and Sam can barely believe it.

It’s idyllic, unreal, this peaceful insular life within chaos. Sam wonders if this was what Magneto wanted, peaceful coexistance, and when he tells Dean he shakes his head, tells him that that was more Xavier’s shtick, and that Magneto was just insane. _You do know he was insane, right, Sam?_ Sam nods, and keeps his doubts to himself. In a way, it still hurts that he bet all he had on the losing side.

They stay for two months, make themselves a place within the community. Sam learns how to bake and how to sow, and Dean tinkers with every piece of machinery on the place during the mornings and tells stories to the kids on the afternoons.

Then they leave, because it’s time and because after so long, they ache for being on the road again. Twenty-one people wave them goodbye.

It’s been eleven months and fourteen days since the explosion, and the world is pulling itself together, piece by piece.

 

\----

 

They find a ’64 dark blue Impala in a parking lot, covered in dust and with chipped paint, but she’s still a beauty. Dean finds himself out of practice with a lock pick, after months of Sam just wrenching everything open, but such a car demands respect.

The leather seats are smooth, obviously taken care of, and it even has a casette player. “Awesome,” Sam says, and then he starts digging around his duffel. “I found this a couple of towns over, and totally forgot about it,” he says, and hands Dean a tape.

It’s Led Zeppelin III. Dean’s favorite is Led Zeppelin II, but he still lights up, says, “Sammy, you outdid yourself this time,” ruffling his hair, and he’s happier than he’s been in months.

They take the car out for a spin, music as high as it goes and windows down, and it feels like the old times, like they’re just on their way to another hunt, another diner, another waitress. Dean misses apple pie. Sam misses steak.

They keep the car for three days, and then they have to admit that it’s just not the same. The wheel doesn’t have grooves in the soft leather for Dean’s fingers and the car doesn’t smell like motor grease and junk food and sweat and blood and Winchester. It’s not the same car they slept in so many times during their childhood, the car Sam used to draw in pre-school when teachers asked him to draw his home.

Dean takes the car inside an office building, covers it with a sheet, and then they leave. They find a Mustang, instead, ’62 and supposedly red, and Dean figures that it’s probably for the best, getting a brand new start.

“So, what, we just ride into the sunset?” Sam ask from the passenger seat. Dean hits the gas and hums Metallica and everything is perfect, for a moment, blue sky and the road stretching as far as he can see.

“Well why the hell not?” he says with a grin.

Maybe not everything is lost after all.


End file.
